In the new issue of Regulation, economist Pierre Lemieux argues that the recent oil price decline is at least partly the result of increased supply from the extraction of shale oil. The increased supply allows the economy to produce more goods, which benefits some people, if not all of them. Thus, contrary to some commentary in the press, cheaper oil prices cannot harm the economy as a whole.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Tag: current wisdom

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly articles in which Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science, reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

Could President Obama have picked a worse time to announce his Climate Action Plan?

Global warming has been stuck in neutral for more than a decade and a half, scientists are increasingly suggesting that future climate change projections are overblown, and now, arguably the greatest threat from global warming—a large and rapid sea level rise (SLR)—has been shown overly lurid (SOL; what did you think I meant?).

You hardly need an “action plan” when there is so little “action” worth responding to.

Projections of a large sea-level rise this century depend on rapid ice loss from Greenland and/or Antarctica. Yes, as ocean waters warm, they expand, but this expansion-induced rise is pretty well constrained and limited to being about 6 inches plus or minus a couple of inches by century’s end. And the contribution from melting glaciers/ice in other parts of the world (not counting Greenland and Antarctica) is even smaller, maybe 2-4 inches. So that adds up to about 8-12 inches of sea level rise by the year 2100—not much different than that which has already occurred over the past century. This is hardly catastrophic.

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly articles in which Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science, reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

In our on-going effort to keep up with the science, today we update our previous summary with two additional recently published lower-than-IPCC climate sensitivity estimates—one made by Troy Masters and another by Alexander Otto and colleagues (including several co-authors not typically associated with global warming in moderation, or “lukewarming”). There is also a third paper currently in the peer-review process.

The new additions yield a total of at least 16 experiments published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature beginning in 2011 that have found that the most likely value of the ECS to be well below the (previously?) “mainstream” estimate from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since the negative impacts from global warming/climate change scale with the magnitude of the temperature rise, lower projections of future warming should lead to lower projections of future damages. We say “should” because one way around this, as the federal government has figured out, is to ignore all the new science indicating less expected future warming when calculating future damages, and inexplicably doubling the damages estimated to be caused by a given increment of carbon dioxide (a.k.a., social cost of carbon).

Here is a quick summary of the two new papers:

Examining the output of climate models run under increases in human emissions of greenhouse gas and aerosols, Troy Masters noted a robust relationship between the modeled rate of heat uptake in the global oceans and the modeled climate sensitivity. With this relationship in hand, he then turned to the observations to determine what the observed rate of oceanic heat uptake has been during the past 50 years or so. From the observed behavior, he was able to determine the climate sensitivity, and found it to be substantially less than that in the vast majority of the climate models. He found that the most likely value of the ECS from the observations was 1.98°C with a 90 percent range extending from 1.2°C to 5.15°C. He notes that the high end is driven by uncertainties in the oceanic heat uptake data earlier in the record.

Otto and colleagues used a simple energy budget model to relate observed global temperature changes to changes in the radiation climatology and the heat uptake in the earth system as humans have heaped various substances into the atmosphere. They conclude that the at best estimate for ECS is 2.0°C with a 90 percent range from 1.2°C to 3.9°C.

Both studies come with a long list of caveats relating to data quality, etc., that are common to all studies trying to estimate the ECS.

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly articles in which Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science, reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press. In this special issue, we focus on the climate implications of a carbon tax.

A year ago, July 23, 2012 to be precise, former Republican congressman Bob Inglis famously predicted the facts on global warming will “overwhelm” GOP resistance to climate change action and alter the party’s stance. In response, he proposed a carbon tax.

That’s the kind of thing that always pops up during the hottest time of the year, which is late July, and it’s again in the public yakstream.

Inglis is “former” because he lost his primary in a heavily Republican South Carolina district by an unprecedented—for an incumbent congressman with no scandal—70-29 margin, and he (correctly) blamed his defeat on his newly-found perseveration on global warming.

Since then, he has associated with R-Street Partners, which calls itself a libertarian think tank, but which is very vocal in support of his tax.

So, as discussions of a carbon tax continue in the halls and chambers of Washington, we provide a handy tool for tax fans to determine the global warming “savings” from whatever emissions reduction their hearts desire.

We leave it to the user (policymaker, Congressman, former Congressman, think tank scholar, President, voter, etc.) to decide how much of a carbon tax should be levied to produce the desired result.

Using our calculator, you can specify

the carbon dioxide emissions reduction amount (calculated from the 2005 baseline) that will take place by the year 2050 (and remain in place thereafter),

the region which will take part in the emissions reduction plan (the United States, or for the more optimistic, the industrialized nations of the world),

and the climate sensitivity (how much you think the global average temperature will increase as a result of a doubling of the pre-industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration). The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) modestly-educated guess is 3.0°C, but a collection of reports from the recent scientific literature puts the value around 2.0°C, and based on recent global temperature behavior, a value of 1.5°C may be most appropriate. Not wanting to leave firebrands like former NASA employee James Hansen out of the fun, we include the option of selecting an extremely high climate sensitivity value of 4.5°C.

We calculate, you decide.

Once you make your selections, the calculator will return the amount of global temperature rise that will be averted as a result of your choices by the year 2050 and also by the end of the century.

Try it using this example. Choose a 100% reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from the United States and the IPCC’s sensitivity value of 3.0°C. Hit “Submit.” The amount of temperature savings that results is 0.052°C by the year 2050 and 0.137°C by the year 2100. (Why we are using three significant digits is in the fine print at the end of this article.)

A Handy-Dandy Carbon Tax Temperature-Savings Calculator

Region

U.S.

Industrialized Countries

CO2 Reduction (%)

0

20

40

60

80

100

Climate Sensitivity (C)

1.5

2

3

4.5

Global Temperature Rise Averted

Your results will appear here.

Sorry, Major Kong (h/t to “Dr. Strangelove”), those are the figures. That’s the right answer. Assuming the IPCC’s value for climate sensitivity (i.e. disregarding the recent scientific literature) and completely stopping all carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. between now and the year 2050 and keeping them at zero, will only reduce the amount of global warming by just over a tenth of a degree (out of a total projected rise of 2.619°C between 2010 and 2100).

If you think that a rise of 2.482°C is vastly preferable to a rise of 2.619°C then all you have to do is set the carbon tax large enough to drive U.S. emissions to zero by mid-century—oh yeah, and sell that tax to the American people.

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly articles in which Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science, reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

Retired NASA scientist and peripatetic global warming crusader James Hansen has a—let’s put it delicately—unique view of sea-level rise resulting from mankind’s use of fossil fuels. Specifically, he believes global average sea level will rise some 15 to 20 feet by 2095. The central estimate from the most recent report from U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is about 15 inches.

Hansen’s an outlier, and proud of it, thinking himself more courageous than other scientists who, he says, are “reticent” to tell the public how bad things really are.

Wethinks that Hansen doth protest too much. His scientific arguments for a large and rapid sea level rise this century simply don’t hold water.

He laid out a summary of his logic on sea level rise in a book chapter (co-authored with Makiko Sato) published last year titled “Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change.”

Below, we have reproduced the relevant text on sea-level rise from that chapter along with our comments highlighting recent findings from the scientific literature which refute each and every one of Hansen’s claims.

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly articles in which Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science, reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

In this Current Wisdom we report further on our ongoing effort to prepare comments on the latest, greatest (or, more aptly, most recent, most indecent) edition of the government’s assessment of climate change impacts in the United States (if you are interested in submitting your own comments, you should hurry, because the public comment period closes on this Friday, April 12).

A disturbing yet ubiquitous aspect of the current draft National Climate Assessment (and for that matter, both earlier editions of the NCA) is the use of future projections of climate change before demonstrating that they work in the recent past, as greenhouse-gas concentrations have increased.

Discussions of future impacts from changes in precipitation resulting from human emissions of greenhouse gases are everywhere in the report and they are usually bad—increased droughts, floods, and longer dry spells, for example. The NCA folks weren’t quite so enthusiastic at generating many forecasts of salutary changes. Perhaps Dr. Pangloss is their spiritual adviser.

NCA’s precipitation forecasts turn out to be uglier than Candide’s fair Cunegonde became. Do the models accurately simulate past changes that have been observed? If the answer is “no,” then the whole impact exercise is meaningless because the models provide no reliable information about what the future may bring.

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly articles in which Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science, reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.

Have climate models, which are claimed by our friends like Ben Santer, to accurately represent the climate of the 20th century gotten things right for the wrong reasons? New research on the role of carbon aerosols suggests that this may be the case. If it is, it does not bode well for the accuracy of forward projections made by the same climate models.

This would represent a classic case of “overfitting”— building a model with bells and whistles added and tuned so as to match the data at hand, but which then breaks down when trying to predict out-of-sample observations. This occurs because the overfitted model has been polished up to give the appearance of capturing the underlying behaviors driving the system—an appearance that is often good enough to fool even the model builders—but, in fact, the appearance is only skin deep, and the mechanisms driving things in the real world differ from those from which the model was built.

A recent paper by Dr. Tami Bond and colleagues finds that carbon aerosols—particulates released into that atmosphere from a variety of human activities including diesel engines, open cook stoves, poorly filtered coal burning, and open burning, etc.—have played a much larger role in impacting the climate than has been previously recognized (and included in climate models).

For instance, Bond et al. report that black carbon aerosol, or soot, is second only to carbon dioxide as the substance emitted by human activity that has the greatest warming influence on the climate—contributing a quarter (or perhaps even a bit more) to the current overall anthropogenic warming effect. Bond et al. find that the total warming impact from black carbon emissions is about 70% as large as that from carbon dioxide emissions.

These finding are similar to those reported a few years ago by Ramanathan and Carmichael but grossly dissimilar to those from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says that black carbon is responsible for only about 10% of the total anthropogenic warming influence.

Apparently, climate models incorporate even less of an influence from black carbon. According to Bond et al. “global atmospheric absorption attributable to black carbon is too low in many models, and should be increased by a factor of almost three.”

The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly articles in which Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science, reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press. Occasionally — as in this edition — we examine recent global warming perceptions that are at odds with reality.

“The habitability of this planet for human beings really is at risk.”
–Al Gore, July 18, 2007

The notion that people just can’t adapt to change (and therefore that governments must regulate change) is known as “Dumb People Syndrome” (DPS). Given the fact that the planet is “habitable” (meaning that there large numbers of people) over a mean annual temperature range of approximately 40°C , Gore’s statement—which is about a few degrees C, at best—is quintessential DPS.

DPS has its subtypes, such as “Dumb Farmer Syndrome”, in which there’s agricultural Armageddon as the world’s farmers fail to adapt to warming conditions. It’s not only preposterous, it’s inconsistent with history.

Farmers aren’t dumb, and there are incentives for their supply chain—breeders, chemical manufacturers, equipment companies, etc.—to produce adaptive technologies. Corn is already much more water-use efficient than it was, thanks to changes in genetics, tillage practices, and farm equipment. The history of U.S. crop yield bears strong witness (Figure 1).

A look at the horrible crop year of 2012 is instructive. Corn yield drops about 38 bushels per acre from what’s known as the “technological trend line.” Because the “expected” yield—thanks to technology—with good weather is so high (around 160 bushels/acre), that’s a drop of about 24%, which is simply unremarkable when compared to the other lousy weather years of 1901 (36%), 1947 (21%), 1983 (29%) and 1988 (30%). Did we mention that the direct fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 has resulted in a corn yield increase of approximately seven per cent?

Most assessments of the impacts of climate change give some credence to DPS. Below is one of the “Key Findings” from the report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States produced by the U.S. Climate Change Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), which was used as a major support for the U.S. Environmental Protections Agency’s “Endangerment Finding” that human carbon dioxide emissions are a threat to health and welfare. According to the USGCRP:

Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.

Many crops show positive responses to elevated carbon dioxide and low levels of warming, but higher levels of warming often negatively affect growth and yields. Increased pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production.

Now compare that to the corresponding “Key Finding” from our report Addendum: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States which is an independent (from the USGCRP) assessment of the scientific literature relating to environmental changes and how they may impact U.S. agriculture:

Crop and livestock production will adapt to climate change.

There is a large body of evidence that demonstrates substantial untapped adaptability of U.S. agriculture to climate change, including crop-switching that can change the species used for livestock feed. In addition, carbon dioxide itself is likely increasing crop yields and will continue to do so in increasing increments in the future.

Another example of the DPS relates to projections of the effects of more or stronger heat waves on human mortality. Everyone has heard—especially after last summer—how human use of fossil fuels to produce energy will increase the frequency and severity of killer heat waves.

Here is how the USGCRP sees it, according to the “Key Messages” from the “Human Health” chapter of their report:

Increases in the risk of illness and death related to extreme heat and heat waves are very likely.

History shows that things don’t work this way.

Why? Because people are not dumb. Instead of dying in increasing numbers as temperatures rise, people take better precautions to protect themselves from the heat.

Numerous examples of this abound, including some pioneering work that we did on the subject about 10 years ago. We clearly demonstrated that across the U.S., people were becoming less sensitive to high temperatures, despite the fact that high temperatures were increasing. In other words, adaptation was taking place in the face of (or, perhaps even because of) rising temperatures. Adaptations include expanding use of air conditioning, increasing public awareness, and more widespread community action programs.

What was interesting about our work is we didn’t even need global warming to drive increasing heat waves. All we needed was economic activity that concentrates in cities. As they grow, buildings and pavement retain the heat of the day and impede the flow of ventilating winds. In recent years, the elevation of night temperatures here in Washington (where your tax dollars virtually guarantee economic growth), compared to the countryside, has become truly remarkable. But you won’t find an increase in heat-related mortality. Instead, there’s been a decrease.
Our research was limited to major cities across the United States. But similar findings have since been reported for other regions of the world, the most recent being the from the Czech Republic.

Czech researchers Jan Kyselý and Eva Plavcová recently published the results of their investigation of changes in heat-related impacts there from 1986 through 2009. What they found sure wasn’t surprising to us, but surely must come as quite a shock to the fans of DPS.

Declining trends in the mortality impacts are found in spite of rising temperature trends. The finding remains unchanged if possible confounding effects of within-season acclimatization to heat and the mortality displacement effect are taken into account. Recent positive socioeconomic development, following the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, and better public awareness of heat-related risks are likely the primary causes of the declining vulnerability. The results suggest that climate change may have relatively little influence on heat-related deaths, since changes in other factors that affect vulnerability of the population are dominant instead of temperature trends. It is essential to better understand the observed nonstationarity of the temperature-mortality relationship and the role of adaptation and its limits, both physiological and technological, and to address associated uncertainties in studies dealing with climate change projections of temperature-related mortality.

Findings like these, along with our own work, caused us to conclude in our Addendum report that:

Evidence is much more compelling in support of a “smart people” diagnosis than its opposite. In fact, if humankind was really as dumb as the fans of DPS would have us believe, we wouldn’t be around today to hear their doomsaying, because Homo sapiens would have been wiped out during vastly larger environmental swings (in and out of ice ages, for example) in our past, than those expected as a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels to produce the energy that powers our world—a world in which the human life expectancy, perhaps the best measure of our level of “dumbness” or “smartness”—has more than doubled over the last century and continues to grow ever longer.

Simply put, we are not “dumb” when it comes to our survival and our ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions, but “scientific” assessments that assume otherwise most certainly are.